Designing shopping-center parking and traffic can be tricky and getting it wrong can cause problems.

Bruce Jervis has found an example at the Hunter’s Crossing shopping center on Northwest 43rd Street with motorists trying to pull into the plaza.

“The entry road is a single lane. Cars going to the McDonald’s drive-through back up into the lane, blocking access to the shopping center,” Jervis wrote. “Motorists waiting for the drive-through refuse to pull forward into the shopping center parking lot. This in turn backs up traffic into the travel lanes of NW 43rd Street. Turning vehicles have no place to move and through-traffic on 43rd Street is impeded despite the green light. It is a dangerous situation.”

And it would seem that no easy solution is at hand.

Matthew Weisman, traffic operations engineer for the city of Gainesville, said the shopping center is private property. He said neither the city nor county has jurisdiction over the parking lot.

“(It) appears to just be a site plan which underestimated the McDonald’s traffic,” Weisman said in an email.

Weisman also responded to an issue raised by Kurt Baumgartner concerning the traffic light at the intersection of Northwest 18th Street approaching Eighth Avenue.

Baumgartner described approaching the intersection southbound and having to wait for the light while northbound traffic had a green. He eventually got the green and was crossing, while a car in the opposite direction did not get a green and would have to wait for another cycle.

“What logical rationale could the traffic department be using to only allow the green light for one side of traffic just because no vehicle is already waiting on the other direction?” Baumgartner said. “Vehicles approaching the intersection deserve the same green light. The light should be green for both ways at the intersection regardless.”

“Because there is only one northbound travel lane, the only options we had were to either prohibit northbound left turns or split the green time between northbound and southbound,” Weisman said. “We absolutely did not want to prohibit left turns since that is why most motorists in the neighborhood like to use the traffic signal, so we went with the split green sequence.”

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